Top Sci-Fi Films at Sundance 2011

What would you do if you could meet yourself? This is the question posed by Another Earth, directed by Mike Cahill. In the film, 17-year-old Rhoda (Brit Marling) has been accepted into MIT, where she plans to study astrophysics. The same night she gets the news, a second Earth reveals itself, pulled out from behind the sun by the alignment of the planets. And then there is a terrible accident that sends Rhoda to jail for four years. When she gets out, Earth Two looms large in the sky, and there are plans to send a commercial rocket there. Rhoda knows she has to be on that ship.It might sound farfetched, but, says Cahill, "We can only see three-quarters of what's behind the sun. So we said, let's put another Earth there! The whole time they're in superior conjunction, so we can never see them." The director sat down with Dr. Richard Berendzen, author of Pulp Physics, to figure out the science behind his premise. "I interviewed him on four different occasions, just for me to learn things," Cahill says. "I was like, how would you send people there? And he was like, you'd need a modified Saturn V rocket. He said that the distance was not inordinately great, but you'd have to worry about radiation and being weightless for so long."Marling, who co-wrote the film with Cahill, thinks that science fiction is the future of storytelling. "We're retelling the same dramas from Ancient Greece," she says. "These stories are so fundamentally old, the mythology that they come from, the hero's journey, the way a narrative works. Science allows you to take the same story and see it from a new perspective, because the science is always new and fresh." Fox Searchlight picked up Another Earth, which will hit theaters later this year.

Another Earth

Another Earth

What would you do if you could meet yourself? This is the question posed by Another Earth, directed by Mike Cahill. In the film, 17-year-old Rhoda (Brit Marling) has been accepted into MIT, where she plans to study astrophysics. The same night she gets the news, a second Earth reveals itself, pulled out from behind the sun by the alignment of the planets. And then there is a terrible accident that sends Rhoda to jail for four years. When she gets out, Earth Two looms large in the sky, and there are plans to send a commercial rocket there. Rhoda knows she has to be on that ship.

It might sound farfetched, but, says Cahill, "We can only see three-quarters of what's behind the sun. So we said, let's put another Earth there! The whole time they're in superior conjunction, so we can never see them." The director sat down with Dr. Richard Berendzen, author of Pulp Physics, to figure out the science behind his premise. "I interviewed him on four different occasions, just for me to learn things," Cahill says. "I was like, how would you send people there? And he was like, you'd need a modified Saturn V rocket. He said that the distance was not inordinately great, but you'd have to worry about radiation and being weightless for so long."

Marling, who co-wrote the film with Cahill, thinks that science fiction is the future of storytelling. "We're retelling the same dramas from Ancient Greece," she says. "These stories are so fundamentally old, the mythology that they come from, the hero's journey, the way a narrative works. Science allows you to take the same story and see it from a new perspective, because the science is always new and fresh." Fox Searchlight picked up Another Earth, which will hit theaters later this year.

Perfect Sense

Perfect Sense

A pandemic is sweeping over the planet. First, it affects the emotions; then, it steals the senses. At the heart of it all are chef Michael (Ewan McGregor) and epidemiologist Susan (Eva Green), who are falling in love even as the world is about to change dramatically. "There's a sci-fi element to it, but it's a story about something happening to humanity and the world and people adapting to those things," says director David Mackenzie. "I felt it was very rich in human values and felt rather different and rather original. It tells a big story on an intimate scale."

To lend authenticity to the film, Mackenzie and Green spent time with epidemiologists, virologists and staff members at various health protection agencies. "We shot it soon after the whole swine flu thing was happening," Mackenzie says. "It was interesting to see how the emergency preparation plans were working. I guess our disease is a fictional disease, but it's interesting—when I mentioned the disease to the the chief scientist for the Scottish environmental protection agency, I think it was, he was like, oh, what would I do about that?" And McGregor and Ewen Bremner, who played chefs, also researched for their roles, spent time in a real kitchen in Glasgow. Bremner even picked up some new skills. "I'm a bit better with knife sharpening and chopping up baby quails—something I would never do in real life," he says. "I'm a vegetarian!"